500 million lines of code visualized

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Apparently healthcare.gov has 500 million lines of code. Is a million lines of code a lot? How many lines are there in Windows? Facebook? iPhone apps?

Sources used in the graphic.

Comments

[icelore.livejournal.com]

Looking at the sources for the supposed "100 million lines of code" - I can't find it. The spread sheet cites an examiner.com article, which then says that "A mention of the massive code re-write comes from theHill" (thehill.com). Backtracking to that article I found "ObamaCare’s online enrollment system might need up to 5 million lines of code rewritten" - but it still doesn't say who came up with this number. Whoever put together that spreadsheet needs to read up on what citing sources means. It doesn't mean just linking to a news article that mentions it, it means listing the actual source.

Digging on my own, I found a NYTimes article that said "One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly," but it doesn't state who the "specialist" was, or who he said that to. It could be a random computer programmer they called up and asked, no one knows. There is no source stated ANYWHERE for this seemingly alarming statement.

Cheryl Campbell, a senior vice president at CGI Federal, the firm that is actually working on the .gov website, didn't say anything about 500 million anythings at Thursday’s Congressional hearing. Clearly the site is afu'ed, but trying to quantify the repairs into an alarming number so that people who no knowledge of coding can condemn it a little easier is asinine.

I also found a nice piece with actual information about coding language that helps clarify a lot. (http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2013/10/healthcare_gov_problems_what_5_million_lines_of_code_really_means.html)

[telemann.livejournal.com]

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/

The author of the graphic welcomes corrections. And I don't think the author is trying to make it easier for non-coders to condemn it, that's a stretch. I think quite the opposite: they're trying to demonstrate how complicated the website is to give non-computer types something to compare it with, and some empathy (perhaps). While on one hand, I'm skeptical too about 500 million lines of code, but on the other hand, it's not that terribly far-fetched idea the structure of the website is a tall order, getting as many different systems involved to be able to talk to each other. As someone noted in comment section noted: It's a simple website that needs to talk to 50 different state governments, the federal government, over a hundred different insurance companies, all of who are running different systems and have their data in different formats. The website part is trivial. Make it do everything it needs to do quickly is crazy.

[icelore.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean to imply that the person who made the graphic was trying to make it easier for non-coders to condemn, more the media outlets who keep tossing this phrase around and around.

From what I've red, while the site obviously has to be huge for the very reasons you listed, it was flawed from the start. One of the goals of coding is to make a neat code, and not over do it. More code is just more chances for things to go wrong. This thing is monstrous, and it's just causing issues it seems. :/

[madscience.livejournal.com]

No... to try to make it do everything it needs to do quickly is crazy. It doesn't need to work quickly. The fact that they even tried to make it interact with legacy systems in real time is one of the major reasons it failed so hard. They should have serialized the queries, cached the results, and emailed users when their data is ready. And this is trivial undergrad shit.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Geez, Jurassic Park only needed 2 million lines of code to automate the entire place.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Maybe they should have used 3, huh.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

I was gonna say "and look how that worked out".

[soliloquy76.livejournal.com]

Programmer here. I seriously doubt this is correct. Sure, a system this complex implemented by multiple contractors is going to be unwieldy and unnecessarily large, but this seems to be a gross exaggeration. Still, this does highlight a major issue with the way the government does business. Rather than farming out work -- for profit -- to the lowest bidder, the government should do what the U.K. did and set up its own tech service. Not only would it save a ton of money, it would streamline processes making them easier to troubleshoot and maintain in the future.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/28/united-kingdom-digital-government_n_4171574.html

[goumindong.livejournal.com]

I am sorry, but that would be socialist

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

We do that here, the only problem with it is that if the public service say "this is going to cost X" then the government will say "you need to do it for X - 20%", whereas if a private company says "this is going to cost X" then the government is OK with pay X + 20% for cost overruns. Neo-liberals love cutting money to publicly run things and then saying "see, the public service is useless!"

[404.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a really unoptimized codebase y'all paid for.

[brother-dour.livejournal.com]

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[cursethedark.livejournal.com]

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